follows that there are ‘cures’ that will sweep away the glitches in human nature and
solutions to conflict will follow. This way of thinking is pervasive in our therapeutic,
Oprahfied society. Many in the world of religious studies also embrace simplistic
formulations about changes of heart and go on to advance naive, if well-meaning,
proposals for dragging us all to the altar of perpetual peace.
Home sweet state
Let us turn to Waltz’s treatment of the second-image view, whether liberal, socialist,
or some other, holding that the internal structure of the state determines whether,
how, and when a state goes to war. If, as I have argued, you cannot seal off the
human nature question from considerations of interstate violence, does it follow that
what happens inside states also figures in their foreign policy behaviour? If the second
image is not ‘dominant’, is it nonetheless necessary? States create strategic cultures,
draw upon similar or vastly different cultural repertoires, as they interact with each
other. One does not have to declare that ‘defects in states cause war tout court’ in
order to argue that internal state structure plays a determinative role, if not a linearly
causal role, in why states go to war. One does not have to be a Kantian – and I am
not – to agree that there is such a thing as an identifiable ‘liberal peace’ of sorts and
that there is an affinity between tyrannical and authoritarian states: witness today’s
unholy alliances of Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and the like. One could also point
historically to the Hitler–Stalin pact, which was soon violated, to be sure, but that
it was agreed to with such initial alacrity tells us about this affinity.
Early feminist theorizing was spotty in its consideration of state systems because
the overriding assumption was that all states are patriarchal, ergo oppressive of
women, and liberal democratic states might be the worst of all because they somehow
disguise this fact. Taking a leaf from a hard-core Marxist notebook, one was treated
toattacks on ‘bourgeois rights’ as bogus, a way to fool those caught in the coils of
false consciousness – all that sort of thing. The state was the reflection of the dominant
class, now cast as a ‘sex-class’ and retaining, thereby, a heavy dose of first-image
assumptions. Such theorizing also invited moral-equivalence arguments (for example,
all states are patriarchal, hence oppressive). To sum up: feminist theory got stuck at
the level of ‘capitalist patriarchy’ with scarcely any consideration of democratic
citizenship and of all the huge gains women had made through democratic
contestation – all that was rather looked down upon in radical and Marxist feminism,
even as some modes of contemporary postmodern analyses undermine liberal human
rights orders by insisting this is but one way to organize things; others cultures do it
differently. Yes, to be sure. But can one not make evaluations as between more or
less free or unfree, just or unjust orders? One advantage of (some) postmodern or
constructivist arguments (and these need not be postmodern per se) is that they do
not, for the most part, make simplistic claims about patriarchy = wars, violence, and
every other identifiable bad thing, including environmental degradation.
An earlier generation of women activists had also taken the internal structure of
the state seriously, but they pushed in a different direction, extolling the ‘bourgeois
186 Woman, the state, and war